


Origins

by aimmyarrowshigh



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, One Direction (Band), Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Percy Jackson, Demigods, Gen, Haeres, Historical, Multi, Origin Story, Pre-Canon, Religious Conflict, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-23
Updated: 2013-05-23
Packaged: 2017-12-12 17:50:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/814304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How demigods are born and made.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Origins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kaikamahine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/gifts), [igrab](https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrab/gifts), [titians](https://archiveofourown.org/users/titians/gifts).



> **Disclaimer** : I don't own anything. No claim of knowledge or veracity is made towards anyone in the story and no aspersions or claims of character are to be inferred. I have no connection nor permissions from One Direction, X-Factor, Simon Cowell, SyCo Inc., Sony, ITV, or Columbia Records. No libel intended. All characters, settings, and proprietary language are owned by the author of the work from which this is derived. Except mythology, which belongs to ~everyone~.
> 
> ORIGINALLY POSTED [HERE](http://aimmyarrowshigh.livejournal.com/92334.html) on 18 January 2012.

** Origins **

**  
_001\. α_   
**  
Jay is nineteen years old, beautiful, and stuffing a designer scarf down her bra in the changing room at Harrods. She’s been ditched by her boyfriend (the lout); she deserves something nice. If she wants to feel like Diana for a day, then well. She’s just going to make that happen, now isn’t she.

She leaves the changing room cool as you please with her hands still and dry at her sides and her head held high. She heads right back into the fray of the shop to browse a bit, because there’s nothing more suspicious than leaving straight off after the changing rooms. 

She’s looking at a jacquard jacket when a warm, solid body fills the space beside her, crowding a bit. The scent of cinnamon and leather creeps over her shoulder as a mouth tips to her ear.

“I saw that.” Amusement. “Clever to come in already wearing a padded bra.”

Jay flushes and turns to see a beautiful man with sly eyes and a riot of black curls, just barely touched with salt-and-pepper gray at his temples. He looks young, though, and _fit_ , and his blue suit makes him look tall and trim. But he’s wearing bright gold trainers and carrying an ebony cane, and Jay wonders briefly if he might be a pimp.

The man leans a little closer, and Jay thinks that she should push him away… but she doesn’t really want to, and besides, if she makes a scene, she’ll get caught. “Security will be around in a minute. You might want to mosey towards the exit.”

He’s American. Jay hasn’t ever actually met an American before. She’s barely been out of Doncaster; London was supposed to be romantic and special and then – well. The lout. She doesn’t need him anyway.

Jay raises an eyebrow, but gives the man a smile. “Thanks…”

He doesn’t follow her, but when Jay gets back outside into the gray London April, he’s standing there waiting for her, leaning up against the side of a Bugatti and tapping his cane idly against the side of his shoe.

Jay narrows her eyes, but smiles. “Alright, then. Thank you and all. Now fuck off.”

When he grins, his cheek dimples and it makes him look younger. “Sorry you got ditched today, Jay. He doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

That stops her in her tracks. 

“Really, now, fuck off,” she says, feeling her cheeks burn. “I don’t know how he told you, but – it’s not funny.”

“I’m sorry.” He sounds sincere. “It isn’t funny. But he didn’t tell me anything, Jay, and… you don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

Jay turns slowly. “You didn’t – he’s not _hurt_ , is he?”

“No,” the man assures her. “He’s not hurt.”

There’s a long pause. A double-decker bus full of tourists goes rumbling down the street and there’s a flutter of camera flashes as the gaggle of Americans and Germans and Japanese take photos of Harrods and Knightsbridge. The gray sky sags and it begins to spit rain that’s neither warm nor cool, just… London in April.

“Are you interesting in dining at The Square?” 

Jay’s head snaps up to look at the man. “I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“Okay,” says the man easily. He taps his cane against the side of his gold shoe again. “Are you interested in dining at The Square?” He grins again and there are those dimples. “The kedgeree is kind of dynamite.”

Logically, Jay knows that she should say no – and probably get as far away from this strange man as quickly as she can; duck into another shop, maybe. But there’s something magnetic about him that’s more than just his confidence… something maybe about the cheeky, sly look in his eyes, like even though he’s grown he could still get up to some banter, and that intrigues her more than it discomfits her and so she says,

“Sure. But I’m still not sleeping with you.”

They go to The Square and somehow, this American knows the chef and tells him it’s Jay’s birthday (it isn’t) and she gets a surprise dessert, chocolate pavé with French cherries soaked in kirsch that makes her a little dizzy. The soufflé towers like something magical and if you had told Jay that morning that by evening she would be sitting in a fancy restaurant like a proper lady eating foie gras and caviar – she decides she likes the first, but not the second – then well, she’d have laughed in your face. 

The American is all _banter_ and so, _so_ charming. He runs marathons, he tells her, and he lives in New York City but travels often to Los Angeles. She asks what he does there but all he says is that he’s a bit of a messenger and an inventor and he’s working on something he tells her he calls ‘the internet,’ something to do with computers and it sounds sort of daft, really, but the way his eyes light when he talks about it makes it seem like it could make sense, someday.

They drink a 1989 Beaucastel Châteauneuf-du-Pape and an ’87 Cabernet Sauvignon and they don’t taste anything like the thin, turpentine wines that Jay gets drunk on back in Doncaster with the lout and his footie mates; this tastes like plums and herbs and blackberries and California and so does the American’s mouth when she kisses him in the Bugatti.

She does sleep with him. And the next night.

And then he goes back to New York City, and a few weeks later, Jay is nineteen years old and beautiful and pregnant.

Louis is born Christmas Eve. She doesn’t have a name for the birth certificate, so he’s just Louis Tomlinson.

On New Year’s, she hears a sound from the bedroom just as they’re counting down on television and she runs in to see the American standing beside the bassinet with Louis in his arms. The baby’s awake and staring at his father with a little wrinkle in his brow, like he’s trying to decide whether to start howling.

“How’d you get in here?” Jay asks with a knot in her stomach. It grows into a hot flash of betrayal and anger and it’s all well and good that he can jet around the world dicking with computers and gold trainers and drinking Châteauneuf-du-Pape and eating foie gras when now she’s fucking stuck in Doncaster with a baby (and she loves Louis, she does; more than she ever thought she could love anything) but Doncaster and baby and a stolen designer scarf are all she has now. “The fuck are you doing here? Put my baby down!”

Hermes kisses Louis’ crinkled brow and settles him back into the bassinet. He looks old when he stands again and regards Jay. Ancient. “There’s something you need to know about Louis.”  
   
 ** _002\. β_**  
Islamabad is bright and hot and beautiful. He didn’t expect it to be beautiful. There are as many lights as in New York, and spires and columns and arches and domes. He darkens his skin just a little and crops his black hair short. He’s grateful for his blue eyes and keeps them, blinks against the sudden sting of smoke as a hotpot of crabs sizzles into spicy-smelling life at the side of the road near a knot of boisterous people. There are cars and men and children and oxen in the street, and it’s as crowded as New York, but differently.

He stops at a towering pyramid display of pickled vegetables and fruits in colors so bright they’re nearly neon, and looks from the violent purple of the striped beetroot to the gentle lavender of the cloth being traded at the stand beside and he smiles even as his heart trip-hammers off-rhythm in his chest.

Islamabad presses against his skin like a warning: _This is not your place,_ pater _. Go back to the West._

Zeus has nothing in the West but a twice-broken pact and an angry Sea brother with his own mistake growing in Manhattan; an angry wife and the ruins of the 1980s scraping up against the base of Olympus on Wall Street.

The horns sound for prayer alert one minute after the sun hits its zenith (not Apollo, this sun is brighter and hotter and does not give Zeus the same hug as his son’s sky) and the street around Zeus slows and stops and gets to its knees.

The East presses against Zeus’ bones and he buckles to his knees, too, as the East whispers _this is not your place,_ pater _, this is ours and you will revere us._

Zeus breathes in deep and touches his head to the ground and follows the crowd around him, mimicking movement for movement. He feels like a human.

This was what he wanted.

He spends the next month wandering around Islamabad, and slowly, the ache in his bones eases. This is still not his place, the sun is still not Apollo’s and the moon not Artemis’, but it stops hurting. He kneels in prayer with everyone else because he wants to, because he wanted to feel human and prayer makes him feel human, makes him forget that Jupiter has a son in California and Zeus has a daughter in New York and damned Poseidon has that baby in Manhattan and he never thought that _Hades_ would be the most – 

It’s not to worry about. He is outside of Olympus’ domain now, and he has no worries. 

On some days, he is an old man with a long white beard and milky eyes. He wraps a turban around his head and sits in the teahouses drinking _Kashmiri subz chai_ from flat dishes and listening to the old men’s stories. He learns about his domain – how people see Olympus’ West. Sometimes it makes him sad. Sometimes, it makes him think. He drinks thick green tea fragrant with cardamom and pistachio and almost prickling with carbonate, and he eats _dahi burra_ with hot chutneys and he listens to what the problems are with his West in the way that only an old man can.

On other days, he is a child, and he plays in the street with the other children. They roll hoops and play with bouncing balls and he learns that some people do not even know there is a West. There is no Olympus to them, there is no Zeus. There is home, and there is Allah, and there is mummy and daddy and prayer and play, but there is no pact and no Kronos and no Tartarus and no struggle for power between the sky, sea, and earth. He feeds oxen lumps of food from his palm and lets their lips tickle his hand, and sings songs to learn clapping games for. His heart aches from missing the West, but for the first time in all eternity, he thinks that maybe the East has its place, too.

And on the rest of the days, he is a young man, and he loves Tricia. She has a student visa and is studying Urdu for Foreigners at NUML, and even though she’s from his West she’s immersed herself in the culture of the city so much that sometimes he feels like he can feel the East buzzing inside her like a light when he touches her. She lived ‘abroad’ as a child, she tells him on their first date as she eats a _karela pyaz masala_ with pieces of bread – as though ‘abroad’ is a place. Zeus smiles and laughs as says as much as he tucks her hair behind her ear, and she smiles and kisses his wrist with lips that smell of spices.

She takes him to the university, which has a funny mix of his own Grecian columns and the East’s domes on its main building, and he touches the column gently with his fingertips as he kisses Tricia goodbye for the day at the front steps. He sits on the grass and watches the handball players while he waits for Tricia to come out of classes.

She’s radiant when she comes down the university steps, wearing a bright turquoise shalwar khameez and speaking earnestly in Urdu to a dark-skinned woman in a hijab. Zeus waits to the side until she notices him and smiles brilliantly, and he produces a bouquet of jasmine behind his back to hand her, and she breathes them in and her hair blows up behind her.

And Zeus finally seduces her that night. They’re lying in his bed afterwards while she draws patterns against his side, practicing her Arabic, and he tells her who he is. He splits the sky into a twelve-hue sunset and swirls it over with clouds to spike lightning from cloud-to-cloud without spilling a drop of rain, and it _hurts_ because _this is not your sky,_ pater _, you have no rights here_ , but the smile on Tricia’s face and the awe in her eyes when she climbs over him again makes it worth it.

She believes him. Zeus cradles her close and calls her _malka_ , queen. 

Somewhere distant inside him, he can feel the West slipping away from him. And he doesn’t think he minds.

Weeks later, though, he lies awake beside her, watching her face in sleep. Outside, the rainy season is beginning the first assault of monsoons, roaring against the roof and the windows and the buzzing in his bones is back. _This is not your domain. You cannot stop the rains here. We are going to wash you away._ Zeus lifts his hand to touch the side of Tricia’s face and watches the color drain from his skin as he becomes himself again, curly black hair and olive skin and the shadow of a beard on his jaw. His eyes rage blue.

Tricia wakes slowly, humming. She blinks in surprise at his Greek face, but smiles and touches his prickly jaw. “What’s wrong?”

Zeus blinks sadly and slides his hand beneath the linen of Tricia’s nightdress to rest against her belly. 

“I can’t protect you here,” he murmurs. “This isn’t my domain. I can’t protect _him_ here.”

Tricia sucks in a breath and her hands fly down to her belly, too, and her palms press Zeus’ fingers closer into her skin. “Him?”

Zeus doesn’t speak. He just kisses the crest of her hairline. 

“Are we going back to New York?” Tricia asks, her mind reeling. 

Zeus looks so sad. “He wouldn’t be safe in New York, either. He isn’t supposed to exist – I made a pact. With my brothers. He’s my son. He’s too powerful. Olympus isn’t a place for him.”

Tricia’s eyes darken. “You’re leaving me. You’re leaving – us. You told me that there are monsters and…”

Zeus touches his forehead to Tricia’s brow. “I am still his father. He will be strong and protected and very, very hard to kill. And even when I’m not there, you are his mother, _malka_. You can protect him because that is what you would do.”

“Where can we go?”

Zeus sighs and scrubs his stubbly chin against her neck. “England. Raise him in England. Keep him off boats and out of the sky.” He kisses her, sweet and lingering, while the monsoon blows hard against the roof, trying to get inside.

“You’re leaving now.” She touches the side of his neck. 

Zeus closes his eyes. “After the rain season. Go to England. You can protect him there.”

“Okay.” She doesn’t cry. Her hand runs soft circuits over her belly, like she can’t believe that she’s really pregnant. “Will we ever see you again?”

Zeus doesn’t answer her. Instead he stands, his _peplos_ and _himation_ swathing him and the crown of oak leaves growing to settle around his head. He looks down at Tricia and touches her chin. “Will you do me a favor?”

She nods and kisses his fingers.

“Raise him Muslim,” Zeus says. “Make sure he knows that he is from both the West and the East. I have had many children, _malka_. But make sure he knows that he is special.”  
   
 ** _003\. γ_**  
Olympus without Zeus, mused Aphrodite, was a bit of a shitshow.

Hera was livid, Poseidon gloated, Apollo and Hermes were off seducing not-even-the-gods-knew-how-many mortals… even Athena and Hephaestus and Dionysis, who usually had a modicum more discretion, seemed to take Zeus’ absence as carte blanche for mortal dalliances.

And dalliances were all well and good! Of course: they were the spice of life, the spark, the sizzle. Aphrodite had _invented_ the dalliance ( _mania_ and _erotica_ and _pasionata_ ). 

But.

The last time there were this many demigods running around unchecked, there had been a world war. That’s the sort of thing that interrupts her _own_ l’amour clandestine with Ares, so really, couldn’t her brothers (and Athena’s brain, she supposes) do a bit better with wrapping things up?

Alright, yes, she had that baby girl down in the bayou two years ago, left in a shop that smelled like chocolate and cream… and then the beautiful girl in Chinatown last year… and alright, Tristan McLean was irresistible just a few months before, but… really. She’s the goddess of fertility. For her, these things just happen.

But she knows, the way all gods know when there’s an aching need for them in the world, that it doesn’t work that way for herself and her brothers and sisters. There’s so much more familial love, _agape_ and _materna_ , flowing through skin and wind and water than there are people to absorb it. It prickles at Aphrodite’s heart like tiny fingers.

That’s how she ends up working at the little clinic in Wolverhampton and Newcastle-under-Lyme. She’s made herself full-figured and plump and brunette, and she likes the way her red-rimmed glasses look against her brown hair and lavender nursing scrubs. She smiles at everyone and watches the waiting room like a bird of prey, waiting for the right people to bless. She may be the goddess of love, but love is, if anything, not fair.

She meets Karen fairly early on, just a few weeks into staying. Karen is not a beautiful woman, but there is a staid elegance about her that immediately attracts Aphrodite. She wears her hair in a sensible bun at the nape of her neck and her posture announces that she’s a detective with the CID before she does.

She fills out her forms very matter-of-fact, but Aphrodite can feel the passion behind them. Two daughters, three miscarriages, complications in the most recent birth, thought to be due to injury on the force.

She wants a son.

Aphrodite feels that love radiating out of Karen all soft and warm and blue-gold-pink, and it’s brighter than the cool jade green of her love for her job and for England.

On Karen’s second visit, she sits down beside a fifteen-year-old girl who shines hot fuchsia-orange-violet for her boyfriend, even though she’s almost eight months along and Aphrodite knows from her forms that she’s planning to keep it herself. Aphrodite can’t hear from the desk what the two women are talking about, but the girl is laughing and Karen flares with silver affection and it touches the girl’s skin to seep in like oil. Karen waits patiently while the girl goes in for her appointment – and when she leaves, the fuchsia edges of her love are pulsing with soft, warm blue-gold-pink.

Aphrodite smiles and sneaks a look at Karen’s file.

The prognosis is not good.

A few weeks later, Karen is back and smiling placidly as usual. She takes her seat this time beside a thin woman with a severe bob and tousled bangs whose love outlines her florid teal with _pragma_ but Aphrodite can see the faded halo of yellow _independata_ : a woman with tremendous self-pride and worth – but flustered, questioning, fading. She doesn’t laugh as she and Karen talk, but that silver affection oozes from Karen all the same and sinks into the thin woman. 

They have to wait for half an hour before it’s time for Karen’s appointment, and by the time Karen gives her a hug on her way out of the waiting room, the yellow is bright, sparkling gold again. They touch arms again as Karen makes her way to Aphrodite’s desk to schedule another appointment and the thin woman heads in for her procedure.

Hours later, when she comes back out and rings for a cab home, she’s still sparkling gold, even though she looks tired around the eyes.

Aphrodite decides then that Olympus without Zeus is a bit of a shitshow anyway – one more demigod won’t hurt.

She goes back to the little flat that she’s keeping in Park Village, with wide-looped crochet curtains in her windows and a curious couple across the way whom she lets watch her change at night, because _ludus_ love is nothing to be ashamed of, anyway. She puts on a kettle of tea and turns Corrie on the telly to play softly in the background, because Aphrodite likes the chutzpah of Tanya Pooley. She strips off in front of the window and crosses back to her kettle to pour the water into her mug before she slips into her dressing gown. 

She drinks her tea and watches the end of _Coronation Street_ and touches herself for a while. 

And then she sets a dish of water on her night table, makes a scallop shell, and lets all of the _storge_ – mauve-purple-blush and a little plush – pour into the shell’s mirror. She’s never made a baby out of this kind of love before, and she wonders just how it will turn out. 

She makes sure to make him a boy.

A few weeks later, it’s August in Wolverhampton. It’s unusually cool and dry for the season, and Aphrodite feels the call in her bones like all of the Olympians that Zeus is home, and he is not happy, and for some reason, that stormy sadness is swirling above England.

She bundles the baby, shell and all, into swaddling clothes and brings him to Bilston. She doesn’t keep the same face and figure she’d worn at the clinic and instead becomes _herself_ again, with flowing titian curls and eyes that shift color in the sun. 

Outside the Paynes’ door, Aphrodite tilts her head to kiss him again before she settles him in his basket. He’s such a curious baby, this placid, serious Liam-thing.

She waits just out of sight, half-shaded by a box tree, until the door opens and Karen’s face peers down at little Liam. Her hair is undone and falling to dust her shoulders and her dressing gown is on just askew. She bends, slowly, to pick up the little pink bundle of Liam Payne, and he’s still silent, just blinking big brown eyes and one tiny hand coming out of the swaddling to pad into her eye.

The entire street seems to glow in the rush of blue-gold-pink.  
   
 ** _004\. Δ_**  
Maura hates Mullingar.

She hates the barracks and she hates Christ the King cathedral; she hates the Grenville Arms and she hates Oliver Plunkett Street and she hates Cassidy's and Finn's and Druid's Chair and Gilleran's and Kerrigan's  
and Hughes' Corner House and Danny Byrne's and Canton Casey's and Caffrey's and McCormick's  
and Wallace's and Daly's and Gallagher's and Cosgrove's  
and Con's and Murray's and Dolan's  
and Cheers and Kenny's and George Evan's and Butler's  
and beer.

She’s starting to hate Bobby. She doesn’t hate Greg at all, the lamb, but sometimes – and she feels so badly about this that it’s driven her to Keenan’s – she might… hate being a mother. Or at least, she hates the way that being a mother in Mullingar in 1993 makes her feel; all Gaelic football and the drone of the Dublin-Sligo line and Greg won’t keep quiet about that stupid UFO back in March and it just makes her teeth hurt, because football is no reason for Bobby not to come home and tell his son that aliens wouldn’t even bother to land in Mullingar, Ireland, for christ’s sake. 

But now the Shamrocks’ season is over and Bobby is actually at home, and he commented over tea that the bolognese seemed a bit salty and it gave Maura a bit of a sting in her back teeth, like they were struggling to say out the words she couldn’t because she’s a mum in Mullingar and it’s all well and good for Bobby to go out for months every night and have fun with the lads but what does she get? Fish Fridays and Ciara at the Scoil Mhuire parent group calling every five minutes with gossip Maura doesn’t care about and doesn’t need to have running through her head at the market and complaints about the salt in the bolognese.

Well, the Shamrocks’ season is over and he can stay home to field calls from Ciara about whose daughter is to be avoided because whose mother was out kissing whose husband so said Fiona last Saturday and fuck all, who cares? Not Maura, as she sits in Keegan’s, turning a pint glass around and around in her hands and thinking, _I hate the taste of beer_.

She wishes Aoife still lived in Mullingar. Beer never tasted quite so bad when she was sitting at the next barstool over.

“You don’t like the Trouble Ór?” asks an amused voice from behind her. It’s not slurring yet, but there’s something strange about it. “Aroma is mushroomy, floral, hint of butter… got some plum and papaya on the palate and oats in the finish… not bad. What’s not to like?” 

Maura turns to look up at the man; he’s got curls and a round jowl and he’s not quite handsome, but his face is harmless enough that she just shrugs. “Don’t like beer.”

He grins. “Me, neither. I’m more of a wine guy.” He sticks out his hand. “I’m D.”

Maura tilts her head. He’s _American_. Doesn’t seem like the sort to go on a James Joyce walking tour, but books could get all sorts of tourists, she guesses. 

She shakes his hand. “Maura.”

“What a great old Irish name.” He pulls out the barstool beside hers and gestured towards it. “Can I?”

Maura shrugs and nods – he _isn’t_ quite handsome, but he’s magnetic and he isn’t hollering about the Shamrocks or picking a fight over snooker in the corner, so really, what does it hurt? 

Besides. She’s married.

D grins at Maura and rests his elbow on the bar and his chin against the meat of his palm. “Tell me about yourself.”

“I’m a mum,” Maura says. “My husband’s a manager at Dunnes and I have a son at Scoil Mhuire.”

“Well, now I know about your husband and your son,” laughs D, “But what about _you_?”

Well, that knocks Maura for six. 

“Ehm,” she fumbles, “I’ve lived in Mullingar all me life. And… I don’t like beer.”

“That’s all there is to you?” 

Maura turns her glass in her hands again. “Feels that way, yeah. I suppose.”

D considers her for a long time, and normally Maura would blush and look away – or tell him to fuck off, depending on the look in his eyes – but he just seems sad and kind of _interested_ and his eyes are this strange color, a deep brown that’s almost burgundy and it reminds her of California, which is stupid because she’s only seen it on television, and of Tuscany, which is stupid because she’s only seen it in books. The cookbook where she got her bolognese recipe for tonight had a big photo of a huge, rolling Tuscan vineyard on the front, all green and gold and deep purple-red.

His eyes remind her of that. So she just fiddles with her glass and looks back.

Then D stands and puts his hands in his pockets as he rocks back on his heels like a hobbyhorse. “It’s kinda loud in here. You want to go somewhere?” He takes out hand back out of his pocket and holds it up, flat-palmed. “No funny business.”

Maura looks around and sees nothing but _Mullingar_ in every bleeding inch of the bar, so she stands up and says, “Alright.”

D gets a bottle of wine from… somewhere… and after she’s downed half the dark-cherry-and-red-bramble bottle, Maura has entirely too much fun saying its Spanish name the way D does, “rrrrrrrr-ee-oh- _ha_.”

The end up by Lough Owel, and there’s a second bottle of wine, something white and sparkling that tickles her tongue, and Maura says, “I went to college for history, and I wanted to be an archaeologist? Travel to Greece and Rome and that and dig up old things, you know, see how people lived thousands of years ago. ‘Cause it’s just – you know, there had to be _more life_ then, or else why would people keep on to now? Is this really all there is to living? Fish on Friday and pub on Sunday and doing science projects all week because they’re too hard for the kids and the carpet’s always full of mud and the husband’s never home, and then when he is home… what’s it worth, really? So I think thousands of years ago, you know, I wanted to go and find that _more_. They had gods and monsters. And we got what, the Shamrocks and Joe Dolan. I figure that there had to be a thing that made them want to keep the Earth going and do all they did. I wanted to find it.”

A few months later, Maura is helping Greg to make yet another poster about that damned UFO and outer space, and she explains to Greg that she has a baby in her tummy and he’s going to be a big brother.

Greg asks if the baby came from the stars, and Maura says yes. 

Niall – his name means ‘champion,’ because Maura believes that names say a lot about a person and she wants him to win a place outside of Mullingar one day – is born wailing. He has a thick fluff of white hair and when he blinks open his eyes, just for a second, the blue is ringed at the pupil with a soft winey gold. Just a light, sparkling blush, like the sun glancing off the brick of a Tuscan vineyard or the gilded roll of a _r_ ioja.

Maura was still a mum in Mullingar, and she still resented Bobby for never being home and complaining when he was, and there was always mud in the carpets and the parent group at Scoil Mhuire and years of science projects about outer space,  
but when Maura looks at Niall, she feels like there’s a bit more freedom in her life than she thought, and she knows that there’s more to who she is than meets the eye.  
   
 ** _005\. Ω_**  
Harry is five years old the first time he sees them. He’s been five for a long time – a thousand years, or thereabouts. He doesn’t keep track. After all, he’s only five. He likes being five; it’s one of his favorite ages. He never gets into trouble when he’s five, and he can curl up in Mum’s lap to go to sleep whenever he likes.

They’re in France. They’ve been in France for two hundred years or so. It’s safe there. No one would ever think to look for Harry in France. They spend most of their days in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and Harry tumbles about on the grass and splashes in the fountains and plays _Crochet et Boiser_ with the little girls. He climbs trees and draws on the sides of statues and grins at everyone all the time, because he’s small and cute and his eyes are the size of the moon. Old women pick him up and coo and give him _berlingots de Nantes_ that turn his lips and tongue bright red. 

_Roudoudou demain, s’il vous plaît!_ he demands, pulling at their sleeves. They kiss him all over his face and bring him the roudoudou the next day, and he sits on the lion statue’s back and licks the candy out of its seashells.

His mother sits only feet away all the time when they’re outside. She can’t bear to let him out of her sight; part of that is just motherly love. 

And no one can love her children like Rhea. The mother of all of the gods, the mother of all things, child of only the earth and the sky.

Her other children can never know about Harry. Not even his father.

Especially not his father.

Harry runs over with his mouth and chin sticky and green from the roudoudou, waving his wax seashell happily, and settles down in Rhea’s lap. He curls her long hair around one fist and tucks his face against her collar and promptly goes to sleep. Around the park, all of the old women and all of the little girls stop and watch him for a moment and smile inwardly, their hands clutched to their bosoms or cupped to their chins.

Son of Rhea, son of Eros. The missing Olympian, always hidden. Harry is the god of infatuation and mischief, and as much as no one can resist him, he can’t resist the things he loves even more. 

So when he sees them for the first time, January 15, 1964, as he gallops – alongside his mother with a baguette perched on one small shoulder – past the Paris Olympia, Harry’s whole world suddenly cuts and tethers on new to someone else. To something else; a new idea, a new need, a new style. A new rhythm. He is so suddenly smitten that within days, the rest of the world follows with him, spiraling into an obsession that would never quite be matched.

Outside the Paris Olympia, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Richard Starkey smoke their cigarettes and shake out their floppy hair and behind them, a track of “She Loves You” blares out onto the street.

“Maman!” Harry crows, pointing at them, his green eyes huge and shining. “Regardez! Écoutez!”

“Oui, mon cher-coeur. Sont très joli,” Rhea sighs, fixing her hand on Harry’s. “Venez.”

That night, after they’ve eaten supper and Rhea has kissed Harry’s face and gone to sleep, Harry becomes sixteen. His bones stretch out just that little too much; he keeps hollows around his hipbones and clavicle, but gives himself a little muscle in his abdomen and chest. His hair is still curly, though, and his cheeks still dimpled, and his eyes still huge and shining and green. He takes the mirror from the wall over the bathroom sink and props it up in his bedroom so he can admire himself for a while, twisting at all angles.

 _Merde_. Somehow he’s given himself four nipples. He frowns and pokes at one of the extra ones, but he can’t seem to make them go away.

No matter. He’s sixteen again now – he’d forgotten how much he loved being sixteen; his father was Eros, after all, he _fucking loves_ being sixteen – and there are more important things to attend to than a few extra nipples. He turns a bit to check out his rear and nods appreciatively, then stands with his hips out to check out what, now that he’s back to sixteen, is clearly the most important part of him.

He grins. He might have four nipples, but at least _this_ turned out well. He lifts it curiously to feel the weight in his hand, then remembers, _oh, I’m sixteen and touching my_ chauve à col roulé _,_ and lets the memory of Paul McCartney sucking on his cigarette fill his head until he’s heavy and hard and gets off twice over the pillows.

The sun just barely begins to rise over the rooftops and Harry looks out at it, watching Apollo’s chariot roll up over the east, and opens the window to lean out.

“Au revoir, Paris!” he shouts, and likes his new sixteen-year-old voice. He throws his arms out and laughs uproariously as two old Breton women in their lace hats look up at him from the street and shade their eyes against the sun to cluck disapprovingly at his nakedness. He takes a last cold lungful of Paris air and darts back into his bedroom. He makes himself a collarless suit, chic and posh and gray, and shakes out his curls before swiping them to the side to smile at himself in the mirror – ducking his head to peek out through his fringe the way he’d seen John do outside the Olympia – before skipping down the hall to his mother’s room.

Rhea is awake, sitting at the side of her bed with her long, black hair in a braid down her back. The look on her face glowed placid and fierce at once: the sort of look that bloomed mountains.

Harry curls up beside her like he did when he was five.

“Tous n'êtes pas cinq années,” Rhea says, not looking at her smallest son.

“Je veux aller en Angleterre,” Harry answered. When he spoke again, it was in a deep, raspy voice, slow and with a curling Northern mumble. “I think I’m English now, anyway. I really fancy a tea.”

Rhea laughed then, and turned to kiss Harry’s brow. “Alright, sweetheart,” she said. “We’ll go to England.”

They end up in a tiny Cheshire village – two streetlights, a church, and a bakery; very picturesque – and Harry falls in with a group of mortal boys to make a terrible racket on guitars and drums.

Rhea has to laugh watching them. Harry is as demanding at sixteen as he had been pleading for _roudoudou_ in the park at five, except now he demanded quicker tempo and more drums and lyric changes. They called their band “White Eskimo” and the girls’ school let them play at the spring mixer.

Harry is delivered home, looking sweaty and not the least bit sheepish, by an incensed nun at half-seven, after she’d quite literally stumbled upon Harry and all three senior officers of the Young Ladies’ Charitable Pep Club in full undress at the back of the coats closet.

Rhea – called “Anne” now in England; she’d been “Antoinette” in France if people spoke to her at all – apologizes profusely for her son and promises fifty Hail Marys to Mother Magdalene. Once the nun has stormed off, Harry throws his head back and laughs belly-deep.

“Mum!” he cries. “There was a man at the dance who says he wants to bring White Eskimo to London! He said we could be ‘the next Beatles’!”

Harry’s green mooneyes shine.

Rhea kisses his forehead. “No.”

Harry’s face falls like rain melting colored chalk from the sidewalk, and he catches his lip between his teeth. “No?”

“Harry,” Rhea says softly, “Your brothers will find you.”

“So?” Harry asks defiantly, puffing out his chest, “Let them find me! I’m no threat to them. Everyone loves me, besides.”

Rhea cups a hand over his flushed cheek. “That is what makes you so dangerous, sweetest heart. They will fall into such obsession with you that they would steal you away to Olympus and forget about the world. They have their own duties and purposes, Harry; they can’t lose themselves in love to you.”

“But being lost in love is good. Especially with me.” Harry’s face is a mask of innocence. 

Rhea strokes his cheek with her thumb. “Infatuation isn’t quite the same as love, sweetheart. It’s the most dangerous love of all. It’s the kind of love that makes good mortals and good gods do the worst things.”

So Harry stays in Church Hulme. The rest of White Eskimo go on to London without him, and without him, they change their name to The Who. Harry blessed them before they left him, and he watches quietly from his tiny parish in Cheshire as they forget all about their first lead singer and lead a whole demographic to sing about their g-g-g-generation.

Harry sings in the street, and sings sometimes at The Old Red Lion, and sings flirty little ditties to girls on the path home from school while he trips charmingly on his boots and peeks out from beneath his curls. He watches everything he can of the Beatles. He keeps a badge of their faces pinned to his schoolbag. In 1974, Church Hulme changes its name to Holmes Chapel, and John Lennon plays three songs at Madison Square Garden with Elton John.

On December 8, 1980, Harry finally understands what his mother meant about infatuation being dangerous. 

A world away, in the shadow of Olympus, John Lennon is dead.

And Harry knows, like all gods know their own divine work, that it is his fault. 

That night, Rhea hears him crying in his room and rushes in to find that Harry is a baby, wailing and inconsolable and wanting nothing to do with the world or love outside of the tiny domain of his mother and warm milk and napping on a blanket in the soft patches of warmth the sun paints on their living room floor. Loving anything else seems – it _scares_ him, and he cries and cries and cries until he’s too exhausted to move and falls asleep, sniffling, on Rhea’s shoulder.

He stays a baby for the next fourteen years. On some days, he’s a toddler, and they go to the park so he can stomp his feet holding onto Rhea’s fingers for balance and pad into the dirt to pick up bits of grass and bugs, but he never wants anyone to be hurt by what he can’t control again. If infatuation and mischief kill, then they won’t exist in the world.

And the domain of the Olympians progresses on without Harry noticing, the decadent, broken 1980s melting into the green ‘90s around him. Obsessive regimes lose their footholds. Decades-old hate softens its fervor. The Iron Curtain opens and the Wall comes crumbling down.

But something is _missing_ from the world, and even the mortals can feel it. 

In February 1994, when it’s cold, Harry is a tiny baby curled into a sling over Rhea’s middle, and she ducks into the small local bakery for warmth and coffee and a bright pink-and-yellow Battenburg cake. Inside, the bakery has Christmas carols playing in the corner, and it’s warm and bright and smells like almond and apricot and yeasty, roasty bread. The choir on the cassette split into a soaring harmony as the sweet-creamy scent of the cake passes by Harry’s nose as Rhea takes the cake. There’s a soft pressure on the back of his head as someone presses a kiss to it.

He stirs a little and blinks out at the bakery girl.

The next morning, Harry is sixteen again with curly hair in his eyes and an absurd scarf around his neck, standing at the stove stirring a pot of porridge with a fork when Rhea comes down the stairs.

“You’re not supposed to use a fork for that, sweetheart,” she says, and kisses the back of his head.

Harry makes a face. “I was hungry. I used all the spoons already. You’ve only got four.”

“Well, no one else was using them,” his mother says pointedly. “Are you ready to settle for a bit, then? Only it’s difficult when you change so frequently.”

“I know,” Harry says softly, and licks some porridge from the fork. “I’m going to work in the bakery.”

Rhea-called-Anne smiles and pats his cheek. “Good. I do love you, Harry, but it will be nice to have some time to myself. You are a very demanding baby.”

“I’m a very demanding teenager, too,” Harry quips, and starts eating the porridge right out of its pot.

And for the next sixteen years, Harry works at the little bakery in Holmes Chapel, selling swiss rolls and scones and chatting up nearly everyone from the parish. He takes up with a steady line of pretty girls and a covert assortment of prettier boys, and there’s a resurgence in the popularity of “comfort foods” and “slow-cooking” in most of the Western world.

There’s also a resurgence in the power of obsessive love, infatuation and mischief and _want_ , and with them come boy bands. Harry tries his best not to love any of them in particular, but they all excite him and he thinks, well, he’ll just love them all equally, then, and no one will get hurt. Rhea-called-Anne catches him singing Take That’s “Rule the World” as he sweeps up behind the counter one evening, and she’s glad.

And then, in February 2010, when it’s cold, Harry is sixteen and beautiful and his green eyes shine up at his mother when she ducks into the bakery for warmth and coffee and a bright pink-and-yellow battenburg cake. Joe McElderry is playing from the radio in the corner, and Harry kisses his mother’s cheek and then bites his lip before blurting out,

“Mum? I want to be on X-Factor.”

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